


Let the Rain

by Polly_Lynn



Category: Castle
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, First Time, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Near Death Experiences, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-02
Updated: 2016-11-02
Packaged: 2018-08-28 15:58:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8452606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: “Beckett, what do you want?” 
It's such a weighted moment.





	

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Episode insert for Always (4 x 23) 

 

_Let the rain kiss you._

_Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops._

_Let the rain sing you a lullaby._

— Langston Hughes

* * *

 

_Beckett, what do you want?_

It's such a weighted moment. So fraught and all the worse for the ready, if subdued, smile on his face until he registers that it’s her on the other side of the door.  

_Beckett, what do you want?_

It hurts that he's surprised. It's agonizing to see his face settle into hard lines. To see the flat, blank expression, and know that he absolutely didn't expect her. It hurts, when to her, it seems inevitable. To her, it seems so clear that the winding path they've followed has narrowed, at last, to this and only this. But here they are facing each other across his threshold, and he's _surprised._ And not at all pleasantly so. 

_Beckett, what do you want?_

It seems complicated again, all of a sudden. It seems unsayable. Everything obvious and right and true that she learned with her life slipping and slipping away. Everything necessary that drew her shield from her hip and her steps out into the rain. Everything seems abruptly and finally impossible as she stares down the barrel of that particular question.

_What do you want?_

She sees his heartbreak. Feels her own rise up again. She goes dark for a moment. Her whole body throbs with regret, and she wants . . . not to have come to him like this. 

She wants to be back in her apartment, forgiving him, because . . . he has a point. He was wrong to lie to her— _dead wrong,_ something hisses in the back of her mind—but she almost fucking _died_ over this. Esposito almost died and, _God_ , the hotel clerk at the Rosslyn. Orlando Costas . . . She chokes off that particular stream of consciousness. She clears her mind and hears him. Asking. 

_What do you want?_

She wants to be back in that moment, so few hours ago that it's nonsense to try to piece these few days together. She want to be stepping into his body back then and there. Pressing her face to his chest. She wants him to know that she loves him, too, whether she can choke the words out or not. She wants his forgiveness, in turn, and she wants none of this day to have happened.

She hesitates in the here and now. Shivering on his doorstep, she draws breath and thinks of telling him all that, but there's so much more.

She wants to have kissed him weeks ago. Chaste goodnight pecks and slow, burning kisses that devour light and air and everything. She wants to go all the way back to the terrible day of the bombing and slam the damned door in Esposito's face. In Ryan's and ask him to dive in with her right then. 

She wants to catch his hand right out in the open. To just give it a squeeze as he rounds the corner with his arm around his daughter. She wants to lay her hand on his shoulder and stroke his hair back from his forehead as she tells him he's a good father. A good _man,_ and he makes her a better cop and a better woman and a better person.

She wants to go back to the moment when she suddenly saw "ready" for the illusion it is—before she forgot how badly he makes her want to really live—and tell him it's damned foolish the way they're together and _not_ together like this. She wants to seize that moment. Invite him in to tear down her walls from the inside. She wants to grab hold of him and everything they're bound to be. She wants to mix some metaphors with him. 

But even that's not enough. She breathes in. Breathes out. She takes in all of him, not quite tall and broad enough to block out the warm, familiar space where he's made her welcome, and she wants more still. She's greedy. 

She wants to kiss him on the dance floor at Ryan's wedding and make out in the back of the car on the way home. She wants to taste the champagne on his tongue and tug that tie right off him.  To moan long and low in his ear to the hiss of her zipper going down, down, down. 

She wants to choke the life out of Sophia Turner for holding a gun to his head. For almost killing them both, but mostly for hurting him like that. She wants kiss the name Serena Kaye into oblivion and growl right into his mouth that he is hers ands hers alone. 

She wants to be with him in sunlight on the swings. She wants to have said things right out loud then. How sorry she was for leaving him. How much she'd missed him. How she'd needed him and still didn't know what else she could have done other than hide herself away that long and heal the best she could. 

She wants to have been the kind of person who wouldn't have ruined them both a year ago. The kind of person Roy Montgomery didn't have to die to save. She wants him to have said her loved her then. To not have hidden behind Josh or her dad. She wants him to have claimed her that night. She wants to believe she'd have listened. That it's what she'd meant when she'd tried to goad him into it. She wants to believe it would have mattered.  That it would have been angry and passionate and life-saving. 

She wants Josh to be guy she never gave a second thought and Demming to be the one she let down easier than she did. Sooner than she did. She wants to banish Gina to the fucking cornfield and that whole agonizing _almost_ to never have happened.  

She wants to have soaked his shirtfront with tears over Royce's betrayal. She wants to have opened that damned hotel door one breath earlier. To never have closed it. She wants the solace of his lips pressed to the glistening tracks on her cheeks.  

She wants two kisses in a filthy alley to have been theirs alone. She wants more than his arms around her as her blood thickened in the cold. As her heart labored and nearly stopped, and she  wants to have had the strength to raise her lips to his. Life enough in her to tell him she'd loved him even then. That Josh and Gina and Royce and the end of the world had been incidental, because she'd loved him even then.

Her knees nearly buckle with the weight of that. The weight of another near-death experience and she tastes river water on her tongue. She sees the stupid punk on the other end of a gun her first day back and the flickering madness behind Lee Travis's grim, hard-set mouth. She nearly turns away in shame, because how many times, exactly, can this happen before she's out of what little luck has kept her alive. How many times?

_What do you want?_

She nearly turns away. The shame is almost too much, but she's stubborn. She's greedy and ambitious and he's to thank for that. He's to blame, and she wants to twist his ear and claw his shirtfront until the buttons fly.

She wants him here and then and now and always. She wants the cocky grin and the honest-to-God-boyish glee. She wants his heart, heavy with loss and sorrow and anger, and she wants the warm, untroubled smile of a soul that truly forgives. 

She wants to be one of his conquests. Wants him to be one of hers, and in that instant, it's all one. Years and sins and triumph and progress and loss fold in on themselves, and she's never been more present in her own life or anyone else's. 

_Beckett, what do you want?_

She breathes in. She breathes out. She crosses the threshold—infinite time and space. She takes hold of him and brings his lips to hers. She shares the taste of rain and determination and certainty stretching out behind her. Stretching out ahead. 

_Beckett, what do you want?_

"You." 

**Author's Note:**

> IDEK


End file.
